Redrawing the game when the player has no movement points is slowing down games

Game Talk The Garage
1

Im not sure how to describe it, actually. But damned if I cant close car doors so easily now …

So, I usually play CDDA at a pretty fast clip, faster than even I can type normally. I even input commands, such as picking up items from a list whose order I know and is set or using items, such as a sewing kit, if the game has not yet caught up to my inputs. The game will perform those inputs.

  Say, for example I want to grab a sewing kit off the floor and use it to repair my sleeveless duster (m).

I can, in short order, press

(e) (right) (a) to pick it up
While the game is processing this Im already pressing
(a) (a) (m)
to attempt repairs. And I press
(down) (enter)
to make it perform until fortified.

But the game isnt on the repair menu yet. Ive entered these commands in advance and the game honors them. Or did.

Since the ‘see what happens when you are mid-move’ bit I cant enter these commands. Very, very frequently I do things like closing car doors in advance while fleeing to my car. But since this update I cannot do this. I end up pathing to the car doorrame, taking up very important time. And this can happen 2 or three times before Im forced to slow down and let the game catch up.

So, I would appreciate this feature back. Days take longer and so does basic microing.

2

I don’t know if I’m having the same issue, but my game is chugging like crazy. Movement is far more choppy and almost an erratic speed. The game is overall less responsive. The menus seem to run fine.

Version 5003 0.C-14998-g21c8b57

Before, I would use software rendering to go faster (I use ASCII, don’t know if that has anything to do with it). Now neither is really responsive.

P.s. was there a minimum turn time added at some point a long time ago? I remember movement used to be crazy fast if one was holding down a key, which of course ended up as running into spiders and getting poisoned a lot.

3

This redraw when you have no turns left makes large cities and hordes, as well as any serious fighting going on between third parties a real beast to sit through.

I don’t think its reasonable to make me watch, as, offscreen, a cat and a zombie fight, and elsewhere, equally out of my sight, a triffid and zombie fight.

My computer shouldnt have to be fast to run CDDA, and the performance of the game is suffering because of this, especially with multiple Zlevels being emulated.

4

Ive done some looking around, and unfortunately I cant add a mod that removes the offending code and I cant even snip it out for my own personal use without recompiling the game.

We should take it out and readd it when it can be a proper option in the interface menu.

5

It’s being really balky for me too. I don’t know if it’s PK’s issue, but it’s not much fun this way.

6

I am having the same issues with the latest experimental where I end up wasting turns and dying, all the while I’d thought I was running through and closing a door behind me, rather than walking back and forth through it.

7

There’s currently a discussion going on over in github about the proper way to address an issue like this (that appears to be fairly hardware dependent). Once we nail down exactly what we want to do we should be able to get a fix up that addresses most of the issues here.

8

I think my issue might have been just a lot of stuff going on at start. Once I cleared the area out the game was snappy, but I haven’t directly ran into enemies since.

9

Did you ever mod that out, PK? I am finding it almost unplayable now; just too darn balky and irritating that it’s setting it’s own pace.

10

Noes.

We cant just ‘mod it out’ because its a hardcoded part of the game. We’d have to recompile it out or officially change it.

A PR was in the works for it, and still can be. But we need somebody willing to discuss it

11

It’s really bad if you have zombies verse animals verse fungal war going on and you try and go through the area.

I restarted a new game because I went into an area with that, and I just modded all fungal and triffleds etc out. @ this point they aren’t worth the stupid stuff they do. I doubt I’ll miss it.

12

Does anyone have any good ideas to optimize how Cata runs then? Processor priority, maybe? I doubt it’s a graphics issue. Multithreading or something?

13

- just keeping tabs.

14

It is actually.
In ASCII mode, the slowdown is noticeably correlated with screen size.
I don’t play in tiles mode, but the tiles code is horribly unoptimized in places, meaning there is no way it comes anywhere near the ASCII mode performance.

Could be significantly sped up by caching, but it isn’t the most trivial task to cache graphics and keep them synchronized.

15

I just do the console, so I guess that doesn’t help. Oh wise Coolthulu, do you have any other thoughts? My rig’s fairly manly; quadcore 3.7ghz, 16gig, pretty recent momboard.
/snivelmode on
Just wanna play…
/snivelmode off

16

Its only an annoyance to me. its very annoying in cities with hundreds if zombies around and combat. any real combat between factions is a nightmare.

I guess its worth mentioning I can play ckii and dont starve together on this laptop? but I wouldnt try an fps on it. even brutal doom was unacceptably slow

pedit: i did play and beat two worlds ii, an early open world 3rd person game similar to a 3ps